Kambo is a traditional medicine used by a few indigenous groups living in the Amazon basin. Considered as a jungle vaccine, Kambo is collected from the Phyllomedusa Bicolor frog and revered by tribes as a powerful medium of cleansing.

Kambo is becoming more and more popular outside of the jungle, but lots of questions remain so we asked Andrea Ferrara- an experienced Kambo facilitator- to talk in depth about his journey with the medicine.

-How did you meet the Kambo medicine?

Andrea: I went in touch with the Kambo rituals where in the Brazilian forest, in a remote village close to Manaus. I didn’t mean to search for the medicine at that time, but I met one of the chiefs of the Katukina indigenous community and so I was coincidently introduced.

-How is your relationship with Kambo and how do you relate to people receiving it?

A: The Kambo medicine radically changed the whole perspective of my life experience on earth. It has been a strong self- discovery in many different ways and now represents the core of my research and work.

Most of the people come accross the medicine by their own, for casual circumstances or through medias, since now the all benefits of Kambo are quite known.

-Could you mention a particular situation that impressed you during your path as a facilitator?

A: In many cases I experienced the concrete proof of the effectiveness of Kambo. Everyday I witness its meaningful purpose and power. Many people get healed or find back the vigour or enter an intense journey to meet the inner- self.

-Right now, how is the state of Kambo rituals within the tribes who traditionally use it?

A: Unfortunately, the use of the medicine is strongly decreased within the indigenous tribes. There are currently about 30 tribes which actively use it. Not many, indeed.

-In your opinion, is there any risk of globalization phenomena like the Ayahusca case?

A: Kambo has already reached a certain popularity in a similar trend of Ayahuasca. It is now a rising phenomena. There are several associations with a strong gerarchy which train future generations of facilitators, but the sad part of the story is that no one of these organizations is supporting the indigenous tribes. They are money machines with not a lot of respect for the sacredness of rituals and the work of the Kambo collectors.

-Do you think this can affect the state of preservation of the frog?

A: In Peru there is an association particularly involved in the conservation of the Phillomedusa frog and this is a necessary step to take. Generally speaking, it is also essential to preserve the immense wisdom and ancestral knowledge of the Matses groups.

-How people can be educated on the correct use of Kambo without exploiting this sacred medicine?

A: As facilitators, we need to get people more involved in the real aspects of Kambo. The contribution of the indigenous tribes to the Kambo medicine, their efforts, the long process of extracting the medicine and the community perspective and wisdom have to be known, because this is the core of Kambo.

Participants need to comprehend how to correctly approach the medicine as a part of their experience and they need to demand for ethics and reliability.

-What’s your opinion on the medicinal applications of Kambo?

A: Kambo embraces a huge variety of medical applications. Its peculiar chemical cocktail made primarily of active peptides, gives an intense physical state of wellbeing and restores the body. We need to remind ouselves that Kambo acts as a powerful antibiotic, antiinflammatory and natural analgesic. One of the most effective known to men.

Kambo spreads beyond the physical realm. Its magic happens with the extraordinary cleansing, the purga. These 10 intense minutes of reset able to remove the ‘panema’, the heaviness of vital force with all the unpleasant feelings of unbalance, sickness and psychological pain. Many persons around the world are suffering this lack of vitality and creativity. Depression, mood swings, sense of unbalance and anxiety. Kambo is able to unblock a series of emotional knots in a very personal way. Like a precise scanner would tap into the right points.

The healing occurs synergistically.

-What’s the spiritual and emotional impact on human life?

A: When the Kambo spirit is transmitted accordingly to the ancestral tradition, it reveals all of its power. Great sense of lucidity, awareness, courage and energy.

Infinite times students ask me to tell the truth about Ayahuasca, since they have read multiple and controversial opinions and reports. They are obviously confused.

So, I decided to write something about ‘truth’ and not about Ayahuasca.

First ask, how do we consider a personal experience true?

Is it truth holistic? Is it what resonates with us and ultimately with our belief system that we enclose in our set of established truths?

For the many sources of information we can access to, we all float in a paradigmatic bubble of uncertainty made certain. This is true.

Information has always been available even before the advent of social media, newspapers and other communication technologies. Real communication between people made information the main currency for human intellect and reasoning. We crave information beyond our ability to retain it. We sustain our mindset with the information we decide to filter and we mostly exclude pieces of truth that are perceived as contradictory.

“Is it too much to hope that a system of education may someday be devised, which shall give results, in terms of human development, commensurate with the time, money, energy and devotion expended? In such a system of education it may be that mescaline or some other chemical substance may play a part by making it possible for young people to “taste and see” what they have learned about at second hand…in the writings of the religious, or the works of poets, painters and musicians.”

The British visionary novelist Aldous Huxley had a clear mind about how to introduce psychedelics in formal education and foster the expanded consciousness in a guided school environment.

Many years passed by and in most countries, governments and mainstream science manage to legitimate the use of entheogens solely for medicinal purposes, never mentioning the intriguing possibility to approach them for personal growth and realization.

It seems very hard to eliminate bigotry and persistent hypocrisy from this paradigm.

Entheogenic education is not a very recent idea, since the majority of tribal societies scattered all over the world have been relied on plants as an effective source of knowledge for centuries.

If in ancient times the shaman was seen as a bridge in between two worlds, the one able to unveil invisible realms and communicate with spirits, today we should review this concept and shed light on a rising phenomenon.

As Western people discovered again the sacred rituals and plants, modern shamans are called for bridging two completely different belief systems and sustain the integration of information through a patient remodelling of mental constraints. This is not because Western people don’t own the primordial force, but it’s mainly due to a loss of communication with the unconscious field, a progressing drift from the roots of being with all its metaphors and symbols.

So, the shaman would be more a translator for an archaic language, a fluent interpreter of nature’s speech.

To review the entheogenic education means honestly to regain the original message of these plants: comprehension and growth. But, do we really understand what it brings us?

A redundant lullaby from people who met for the first time a master plant in a ceremony sounds like: ‘and now, what should I do with it? How can I apply all this powerful, transforming knowledge in real life?’

Many times these lullabies float obsessively in a space of uncertain awe; big, fluorescent question marks framing the depth of a joyous experience which may remain inexplicable. Without being educated first on the use of entheogens, maybe we’ll never be able to reach a profound absorption of knowledge, maybe we will sit on disappointment and distress with a sense of frailty. When we stretch the burdens of our mind, we apply a vigorous pressure inside ourselves and if we expect an immediate change or a shaking result we may force a process that needs care, compassion and patience.

By enclosing the use of entheogens in a free, educative space we nurture the seeds of change to a richer degree. We allow ourselves to consciously receive the message and to create a mature relationship with a plant.

Yet we have no system or set process to allow such examination and exploration in a healthy and proper manner. We have relegated the ecstatic experience of chemistry to the halls of the profane and the illegal. We have added it to the list of necessary oppression in a culture that gets high on oppression and sublimation rather than true responsibility that comes with freedom.

Entheogens unfold their potential in a prepared soil and definitely teach humanity how to progress as a fully developed, synchronized organism. There is a lot to learn, a universe of knowledge awaits to be explored with the simplest of the tool: education.

The human brain is a complex entity constantly at work, sending electrical signals, communicating, building new neural connections and so on. This electrical activity generated by the brain, also known as brainwaves, reflect our state of mind. Reality is not based on outside influences but is an internal process based on our thoughts, perception and emotions. If we deepen our understanding of these brainwave frequencies, we can control our reality. There are five different kinds of brainwaves – Beta, Alpha, Theta, Delta and Gamma.

It is completely a natural biological occurrence in every human being to experience these different states at various times in a day, and generally one state is dominant. Did you know that each brainwave has its own set of characteristics representing a unique state of consciousness? Each brainwave state occur in a specific frequency range measured in cycles per second (Hz). Each type of brainwave played a critical role in our mental development during our childhood. And today, they play an important role in maintaining our health and vitality as adults.

Altering Brainwave states

All of us experience these brainwave frequencies at different times every day, which take us to different levels of consciousness. Like when you are awake you are in a different brainwave state as compared to when you are sleeping. You can alter your brainwave pattern in order to reach a desired level of consciousness. For example if you can’t get sleep at night when you feel stressed, you can synchronize your brainwave into the frequency that corresponds to sleep using sound. This technique of synchronizing your brainwave frequencies to an external audio stimuli is known as Brainwave Entrainment. As this process is continued for sometime, the brainwave is tuned to the frequency of external sound and thus achieve the particular frequency level of that sound (alpha, theta or delta). But you don’t need external stimulus if you can meditate. During meditation you reach a calm and relaxed state, this is the alpha state of consciousness. As the meditation deepens you find yourself being more calm and focused and the brainwave level reaches to theta (and finally to delta) state.

Binaural Beats

How can a sound with frequency lower than 20 Hz range be audible to the human ear? The answer lies in a specialized sound known as Binaural beats. What it does is simple – playing two different frequencies in each ear, the brain detects the difference between the two frequencies and tunes into the third ‘binaural beat.’ So if you play 400Hz into the right ear, and 410Hz into your left ear (using stereo headphones) your brain produces a third binaural beat pulsing at 10 Hz, which is the difference between the two tones. 10 Hz is also equal to the alpha frequency, which brings about light relaxation, meditation, and creative thinking. Binaural Beats shall provide you some excellent results often instantly which will help you in many ways.

When a larva spins a cocoon and then destroys its all being to flower as new creature, even if hundreds of growth factors and molecules are all triggered to flame this action of wonder, I can still feel immersed in a magical world and stay silently astonished.
Biologists will see at molecular and higher levels, almost nothing but an effective employment of a thousand interwoven means to achieve a thousand interwoven ends — all in an almost incomprehensibly organized, coordinated, and integrated fashion expressing the striving of the organism as a whole. The organism, they will say, as it develops from embryo to adult — as it socializes, eats, plays, fights, heals its wounds, communicates, and reproduces — is the most concertedly purposeful entity we could possibly imagine. It does not merely exist in accord with the laws of physics and chemistry; rather, it is telling the meaningful story of its own life.

In explaining revolution they will add that the environment will select the fitting individual and that the ‘true shaper’ is randomness.
This robotic, mindless architect appeared to me to be a simple, reduced formula for not envisioning other sources. As it is said, ‘Randomness is not enough to explain randomness’.
I am not calling now transcendental forces, but I would rather admit that this accidental world with these accidental beings don’t fit the whole picture. In a really sceptical mind there is always space for doubts and questions may arise.
Even the more conservative scientist would be able to surrender to the fact that we live in a very subjective world made of complex systems where our perceptions are strictly limited to the piece of knowledge we can investigate. This little piece is genuinely understood, but often not enclosed in the whole picture.
Theologians say that this ultimate functional complexity is the revelation of a superior being or a creator while creationists say that there is an avant-garde design, an intelligence at work.
When names and terms matter, it is clear that we can find million different spiralling truths pointing the same direction: an unknown field to explore.
As I write this piece of paper, randomness occurs. A grain of dust will fall in between the keyboard in a specific, unplanned way, a little ant will decide or not, to cross its path with my finger at a certain moment and so on. But even for dust and ant’s path randomness occurs. Randomness in environmental encounters does not imply randomness in the organism. We are all gently connected in an unsupervised freedom of will which is ultimately life.
In this sense life is more a wild dance than an organized scenario. It looks that we live in a schizoid universe, but from this apparently chaotic ballet, consciousness emerges. Intensely.
Where there is consciousness there is influence, interaction, adjustment, open discussion.
Image now that consciousness is not a mere package installed in every single body-mind-soul entity. Image that there is no package or discrete box.
If consciousness is omniscient, ubiquitarian and non-local, so this Darwinian environment of purposelessness transforms itself into an open space where random chances are a way to express life or one of the possible lives.
The idea of a mindful universe is now accepted by many physicists and the very scarcely material quantum weirdness appears like a little child to be better understood. With these new pair of eyes, even if we know every small detail of a biochemical cascade provoking us to have a dream or feeling love, we are just observing the immediate consequences of a mystery.
This unbroken thread of life explains why we encounter the language of meaning and purpose that the biologist breathes into every description of every organism. Everything characteristic of the organism, from its behaviour as a whole down through the performance of its various organs all the way to the micro-world of interwoven molecular processes in the cell can only be described, and always is described, in a language of coordinated processes, governing norms, and means brought into the service of ends. We are never talking merely about physical and chemical interactions, but rather about processes continually shifting, transforming, and adjusting themselves in relation to their context in order to go somewhere, if only to hold themselves within reasonable distance of some particular state, mainly death.
This ‘to go somewhere’ itself cancel the sense of randomness since it unveils a strong purpose, a febrile motion and a full-sight vision.
Again, new discoveries in biology led to a different interpretation of random events in evolution especially regarding mutation at a genetic level.
The genome of every organism is actively and insistently remodelled as an expression of its context. Genetic sequences get rewritten, reshuffled, duplicated, turned backward, “invented” from scratch, and otherwise revised in a way that prominently advertises the organism’s accomplished skill in matters of genomic change.
With the words of the geneticist James A. Shapiro “We have progressed from the Constant Genome, subject only to random localized changes to the Fluid Genome, subject to episodic, massive and non-random reorganizations capable of producing new functional architectures. Crucially, genetic change is almost always the result of cellular action on the genome.”

So, what’s Randomness?
Randomness is a fundamental aspect of modern physics and most physicists expect the most basic laws of physics to be very simple expressions of fundamental symmetries. But unfortunately basic laws of physics only tell us what sort of dice were rolled to generate our history.
A series of random events are patternless and this means that we cannot recognize a pattern and place it in a network of causes. In this sense a random event is, at some level, an uncaused event. And in physics, the so-called randomness is when one sees no pattern and no good prospect of finding one. The good news is that when we live our ordinary lives in this shared reality we all depend on our pattern recognition skills to figure out what is going on and make sense of reality in terms of actions and reactions.
When patterns fall apart, we just fail in understanding reality. We miss the cause.
Metaphorically, randomness is just the ungraspable feeling, the unsubordinated aspect of a multiple personality which is normally showing a predictable behaviour. Randomness is the final ingredient for a creative machine.
As human beings when performing in this intricate web or open system, we primarily express apparent randomness with our unconscious acts, which embody almost 90% of total acts and we simply not recognize a cause moving the threads. We look objectively random creatures. The simple truth it’s that we are not conversing with our subconscious, not enough to reveal the hidden cause.
Living beings are definitely non-algorithmic. Being faithful or not, a creative process needs a great degree of flexibility and cannot be trapped in a web of predictions and formulas.

In the cold beauty of a Siberian steppe the Buryat initiation for a shaman will take a lifetime to be honoured. First the initiate must receive the call, through no visible channels or wires, he or she will connect to the urge of being a community servant for spiritual growth.

Though repeatable cleansing ceremonies of old apparatus, beliefs and mental attachements will be performed with a series of rituals reaching ecstatic states, the initiate will lie in a trance for at least 3 days. Then he or she crawls out of the smoke filled yurt to celebrate the emergence as a Shaman. Before that, he or she spends several months or years in introspective wandering to enforce the call and to consciously destroy all the unnecessary appendices. He or she will let the ego starve, will let the unknown absorb the whole organism and will finally surrender to the emerging force or unfortunately die.

According to the vision of the collective unconscious developed by Jung, the Archetypes flow smoothly and live permanently in the astral world.

All the by-products of our emotions, feelings and all human desires inhabit the astral body, which is also the elective soul carrier. Not surprisingly, the translation of the Greek word psyche is “soul” or “breath out of the body”, the totality of the human mind with no physical home.

The astral world represents the virtual place where soul memories, individual and collective histories of humanity, accumulate and dwell. This is the same place that we visit during dreams, when our astral body diverges from the constraint of matter, and from space-time limits, floating and melting completely within the cosmic resonance.

Resting comfortably on the pillow of existence a tiny gland exists, modeled as a pine cone and with the peculiar ability to let us face the world by modulating consciousness in a meaningful way. Sometimes called ‘third eye’ or ‘seat of the soul’, the pineal gland has been precisely dissected and rationally investigated for millennia, not even partially understood in view of its charismatic role. It is the one flashing an enigmatic substance which is able to penetrate the density of the matter and far beyond; safely assisting us since we have been here as humans.

The enigmatic pineal gland in humans acts as a neurotransmitter related to the serotonin family and as a bridge between the nervous system and the endocrine system, involved in several unknown mechanisms which are deeply connected to the consciousness flashing process retained during near-death experience (NDE) or any delta state of the brain.

The candle sheds the vivid light all around, whereas the moon cannot caress the darkness of the forest. A very young boy carries magic stones, myrrh and a bunch of incense sticks. I cannot pronounce his name, but it sounds like an ancient lullaby. The primordial drum vibes with giant, clear notes. So, the old man with the majestic voice whispers his song.

“Why did he throw the seeds into the fire, then?” – a voice next to me asks.

After joined many ceremonies one day I asked myself the same. What if there were no sacred gestures? What does it make the difference?

“Rituals are calls for the healing to occur. They evoke the collective imaginary to presence a significant event. If you rest in faith and stillness, magic appears without stress” – I finally reply.